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The count-down is complete; the line has served its time. In this spirit of millennial closure, the Winter 1999/2000 issue of ebr will be the last written under the constraint of periodical publication.

writing under constraint

Brian Lennon considers the aesthetic that Retallack has evolved out of a cybernetic sensibility - a formalism that does not impose authoritarian codes or repressive orders, but rather hacks a pattern out of the sheer data of everyday life: directories, menus, phone books, indexes, encyclopedias, and archives.

Maria Damon reviews Alan Sondheim’s Writing Under: Selections from the Internet Text in light of the literature of John Fahey to demonstrate that those texts, like her performative review of them, enact a “mastering/dismantling itch twitch” that has a “life of its own, moving through the artist in a parasitic way.”

Abish’s Alphabetical Africa is pondered here, in a critifiction by Louis Bury. Bury’s text is written - like the novel itself - under constraint: each critical query begins with a new letter of the alphabet. Culminating in “Zeugma,” the essay explores the poetics of Abish’s linguistic experiment from somewhere close to the inside. (Doug Nufer’s Negativeland gets a similar - though more subtle - treatment in another Bury piece.)

Examining Doug Nufer’s Negativeland, a constraint-based text, Louis Bury adopts the same constraint as the novel - an approach NOT dissimilar to his treatment of Abish’s Alphabetical Africa. In this case, the constraint is a prohibition against sentences lacking “some form of negation” - a commitment not unlike the affirmation of negativity.

On the occasion of the 2003 Fitzpatrick O’Dinn Award publication, Alan Sondheim asks some questions of formally constrained literature. The more strict the constraints, the more open, free, and plentiful the questions.

ebr10, a satisfyingly even number published at the turn of the millennium, seemed at the time like the right occasion for calling an end to issues altogether. In the event, we would not manage to eliminate issues until February 2002 - that palindromic month and year, as satisfying in its way as the y2k.

Stacey Levine on the occasion of Dalkey Archive’s reprinting of The Age of Wire and String

Current thread editor: Joseph Tabbi. Writing Under Constraint was launched in the winter of 1999/2000 by Jan Baetens. The Writing under Constraint graphic was produced by Anne Burdick and Rei Fukui in collaboration with Daniel Wenk.